Dietrich

Note to self: Keep own Tigers/Panthers in turret-up position (i.e. with only hull exposed) to obviate main-gun damage.

Someone (I'd do it myself, but I'm at work right now) should try putting a bunker, at least a wooden one, inside a building. Methinks that could simulate a building that's been turned into an improvised strongpoint.

Thanks for the heads-up, Mord! =)

Whereas if a Kiwi had been the first to post an answer to Erwin's question, he would have given exactly the opposite response!

Given that, as of CMBN, the chain-of-command section of the UI accommodates no more than four levels (from top to bottom: squad > platoon > company > battalion), does the greater number of C2 levels with the Italians mean that the corresponding part of the UI is different in CMFI? Or is the Italians' structure different enough that it actually can fit within the existing four-level UI?

Three cheers for the modders! =) Hip hip...! *waits for others to join in with "hooray!"*

Plenty of times I've seen a pixelsoldat get WIA/KIA while readying a grenade and the grenade falls from his hand and expodes nearby, sometimes wounding nearby squadmates.

Seems to me the article basically says that CMSF "gets it wrong" because of the way things currently are with regard to Syria and the West's prospective humanitarian intervention therein. Various parts of the article show that the reviewer was viewing the game consistently through spring-of-2012 eyes, despite mention of the game's stated premise. Of course, that's perfectly understandable, since if it were not for the current political/military situation in Syria, CMSF wouldn't have attracted the reviewer's attention. Some observations: Except that this isn't a case of life imitating art, it's a case of a reviewer thinking that art is imitating life. Because CMSF's premise isn't based (as the reviewer himself goes on to say) on Assad waging war on the citizens of the country he rules in a time when the US is weary from 10 years of two-country war and when just a year earlier NATO struggled somewhat to successfully conduct a strictly air-to-ground intervention in the Libyan civil war. This makes it sound like one day in early 2008 the West suddenly said "Y'know, we're sick and tired of the Syrians supporting terrorism, so we're gonna invade Syria"; rather similar to how the US invaded Iraq even though the regime of that country had virtually nothing to do with 9/11. Whereas CMSF's stated premise is that terrorists supported by Syria set off dirty bombs in a number of major Western cities. Methinks the reviewer didn't play any of the scenarios involving USMC infantry. That implies that UAVs, armed as well as unarmed, have at least partially supplanted manned combat aircraft in Western militaries. Is this really so, even in 2012? What percentage of the air-to-ground ordinance expended in Operation Odyssey Dawn was delivered by UAVs? Sure there are. One can have as many guerrillas/irregulars in a scenario as one wants, and they can be as skilled and fanatical as all get out. They're just not labelled "Iranian/Hezbollah fighters in support of Assad". I respectfully defer to LongLeftFlank on this point. In some scenarios/campaigns, yeah. But the game's scenario editor is versatile enough to simulate a not-as-narrow-as-many-may-think range of situations. That's the way things are in Syria now, in the spring of 2012. And the extent to which such would be true even in the summer of 2008 (the game's particular timeframe) could be simulated through sufficient skill on the part of the scenario designer. "Blue-plus-Red versus Red-plus-different-shade-of-Red" battles are just as feasible as (*yawn*) conventional "Blue versus Red" battles. And one can even "program in" some heavy-duty friction (vaguely of the Clausewitzian sort): Say an American platoon commander is supposed to bring his unit to a certain public building in the outskirts of some city in east-central Syria to rendezvous with local rebels; but a car bombing (accidentally by said rebels? intentionally by members of a pro-regime faction? who can say?) kills said American platoon commander along with a vehicle's worth of his men, plus a number of local fighters and civilians. The NATO campaigns are much more varied and nuanced with regard to "not fighting the Syrian military" (despite scenarios like that one in the German campaign where you have to withstand an MBT-and-AFV rush, that one which gave folks grief aplenty back before CMSF v1.31 when Marders carried Panzerfaust rockets but no launchers) than the early scenarios/campaigns made for the game, yet even the British campaign has a good number of "by Jove, this is rather bloody asymmetrical" scenarios (like that one where a British platoon is under siege in a police station after a car bombing and the mech-inf QRF has to fight its way down narrow zig-zag streets against roving fighters and has to not 'frag' the allied anti-regime forces also on the map). That said, I'd quite like to read LongLeftFlank's take on the review.

If, then, 10,000 Maniacs is an LA thrash band, what does that make Fine Young Cannibals? Or Screaming Headless Torsos? :confused: Oh, and you can add Rush to the "still not inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" list.

As per Wikipedia (FWIW):

Fair enough. So I say bring it on and rhetorically ask "Why not a CWTH game?" There, methinks, is the proverbial "kicker". I'm a few months shy of 30 years old, whereas (so I infer) y'all who long for a CWTH game are rather older than that. Also I'm relatively new to wargaming (aside from a few flight simulators, my start was with CMBB and CMAK in the mid 2000s), so I don't have a stemming-from-when-the-Cold-War-was-still-ongoing history with such. With regard to "arguing the reverse": I don't play Blue and think "Take that, you [insert hateful, propagandistic epithet here]!"; nor do I play Red and think "Take that, you [insert hateful, propagandistic epithet here]!" I'm just a sucker for whoever has the better "toys" and/or the better-developed tactics. My interest in CMSF stems from an interest in military stuff generally; that's why I'm interested in all types of scenarios (Red-vs-Red, Red-vs-Blue, as well as the more "stereotypical" Blue-vs-Red) and in playing all the forces (the various branches of the Syrian military included in the game as well as the several "NATO" forces in addition to the US ones). And I find interesting the juxtaposition/opposition of (late) Cold War-era equipment and tactics with post-Cold War-era equipment and tactics. With regard to the bemoaning of Red's capability in CMSF: Y'all must be far better wargamers than I (which would make sense, since some of y'all have been wargaming since before I was born), since only occasionally (e.g. in old (pre-v1.10), not-well-designed scenarios) do I find Red anywhere near an eye-rollingly yawn-inducing walkover as some make it out to be.

Some of the sentiments expressed in this thread lead me to the (perhaps wild) surmise: What's the second most (after NW Europe circa summer of 1944) fantasized-about, near-fetishized wargaming area/era? Cold War turned hot, Central Europe, circa 1985. Would someone perhaps elucidate just why (some) people are so droolingly keen to wargame this strategic scenario? Is it because such never actually came to pass (i.e. the Cold War never turned hot and in fact fizzled out altogether)? Is it because NATO spent decades preparing for such an eventuality but never had occasion to employ the fruits of its preparation? Is it the implicit assumption that such an eventuality would somehow not entail the subsequent use of nuclear weapons by both sides? That said, I'd still be interested in playing a NATO-vs-Warsaw-Pact c.1985 Cold-War-turned-hot game. In my experience, BMP-3s are not to be taken lightly, even if one is playing Blue and has MBTs. Sure, a BMP-3 is apt to explode spectacularly if one's Abrams scores a hit or if a TOW from one's Bradley finds its mark. But I find that with the firepower BMP-3s can dish out and their superior (to that of their forebears) targeting, I'm wary of just driving my Abrams and Bradleys into their LOF like I would be with BMP-1s.

Or is it simply that the pictured tank... ...is missing its mudguards/fenders/[insert appropriate groggy technical term here], so that it looks back-to-front in comparison with the in-game Churchill? For comparison:

Wait... you have a bunker, and she can just walk inside? Clearly, your first problem is security. The question of what you should do when the wife infiltrates your bunker and demands to be taken shopping shouldn't have to be asked if the proper security measures are in place. That, or she's capable of defeating your security measures.

*menacing mechanical breathing* "You du not know ze power of ze schwarze side!" *clenches black-gloved fist* P.S. Keep up the great modding, Mord ol' pal. =)

Panzerfaust instructions illegible. Game fundamentally flawed. /good-natured sarcasm

Better yet, Rita Hayworth and a USO troop.

Thanks much for this, Ryujin-san!

The USMC FiST Team can't be renamed. I found this out in the course of designing a scenario. I wanted certain units to have specific names so I could refer to them by such in the briefing. As you can see, I gave Kilo Company's CO the name West: And the name shows up in 3D mode accordingly: As for the FiST unit, what should be Vegapacheco shows up as Santos: With the name reset to default, the name is different, but also the leadership modifier is different (all the units in this formation have the same "soft" settings): I double-checked this in the editor and found that in both USMC infantry formations (Infantry Battalion and Marine Expeditionary Unit) every FiST unit is un-rename-able. Granted, CMSF's development is done, so it's not like this will get fixed it some upcoming patch, but I figured it'd be better to let y'all BFC folks know about it; and there are probably other individual units in various other formations which are un-rename-able. If nothing else, tis for the forum a bit of ever-so-mild amusement and for me some practice putting pics in posts.

AAV-7A1 surviving side hit from RPG-29: Thank goodness for that ERA! IIRC, two of my AAVs were hit (but only lightly damaged) by RPG-29s in that scenario, and while the driver of one was KIA, the crew of the other (the one pictured) came through unscathed, though certainly rattled.

The Guardian: Gaddafi killed as Sirte falls Al Jazeera: Muammar Gaddafi killed as Sirte falls Open Channel (MSNBC): US drone fired missile at Gadhafi convoy

A missed opportunity for additional humor: the card isn't signed — "Sincerely, Corporal Stick-Figure" or "With lethal affection, yours truly, Bob".

But said "French" weren't actually French, at least not entirely/mostly — they were the descendants of the Norse Viking conquerors who settled in the former kingdom of Neustria (part of the Kingdom of France), which historically had a mostly Frankish population.

According to what I've read, OIF benefitted considerably from the nearly decade-long SEAD/no-fly-zone campaign conducted against Iraq in the form of Operation Southern Watch and Operation Northern Watch — by the time OIF actually launched, the Iraq integrated air defense system (IADS) was so thoroughly suppressed that pretty much all the SAM/AAA fire against Coalition fast movers was ballistic (i.e. without radar guidance). I don't know how formidable or extensive the Syrian IADS would be in the 2008 of CMSF, but I reckon that the coalition SEAD effort would probably have to be rather more strenuous than it was immediately prior to and during OIF. Given that in CMSF's 2008 the Iraq and Afghanistan "wars" would (as far as I know, anyway) still concurrently be ongoing, the number of aircraft available for deployment against Syria would be fewer and would be probably be busier; on the other hand, thankfully the broader coalition support against Syria would take up some of that slack — in the SEAD role, for instance, the Luftwaffe could employ its Tornado ECRs. Granted, such is in several ways beyond the scope of CMSF itself; but I, for one, find it interesting to contemplate not only the tactical ground aspect of the hypothetical invasion of Syria but also the strategic aspects and the air and sea forces involved. The more I read about OIF and its various aspects, the better sense I get of how the Syrian invasion (Operation Nemesis?) would probably be conducted, and the better I understand how to translate that into realistic and detailed scenarios for CMSF that I hope to eventually make.

Recce Vehicle: Insofar as it doesn't have dismount-able scouts, I rather like the Coyote. But since dismounts can be quite handy (granted, we are talking about H2H, which tends to involve players rushing to engage each other rather than carefully reconnoitering beforehand), I'd go with the M2A3 – its TOWs can take out MBTs (when necessary), its cannon and coax are good against everything else (except BMP-3s >.<), and its protection is good (even without ERA). IFV: CV9035NL – great marks across the board; though the cannon's rate of fire, while helping ensure that its targets get knocked out right quick, tends to exhaust its ammo supply in fairly short order. MBT: M1A2 SEP TUSK Abrams – excellent marks all around, plus hunter-killer capability (though I'm sure Damian90 would probably assert differently on that point). Anti-Armor: Javelin, hands down. Infantry: USMC rifle squad – more firepower per fireteam than any other infantry squad in the game, plus more light AT assets per fireteam (though such aren't as hefty as the PzF3, of course) than their US Army counterparts. Sniper: L115A3 / C14 Timberwolf (.338 Lapua Magnum) – excellent range and terminal ballistics; more portable than a .50 BMG weapon. Artillery: Panzerhaubitze 2000 – über-precise targeting makes for optimum ammo employment; accurate enough to score knock-out hits on stationary armor in fire missions as short as a few rounds. Fixed-Wing: A-10A – more LGBs/ATGMs than any other fixed-wing asset, plus a great onboard cannon. Rotary-Wing: AH-64D / AH-1 – highly effective chain gun, highly effective missiles (I find that rockets are fine when they're on target but are a waste of ammo when they're not). I haven't ever seen UAVs or Taliban in CMSF; nor have I ever witnessed comms-jamming in game. Have you, BlackMoria?